Spica Adventure

Game info:

Spica Adventure is an Arcade game from Taito. The game's heroine must pass through a series of stages filled with abstract and cartoony dangers, similar to Taito's earlier Bubble Bobble series (though, graphically, it resembles Taito's later Mr. Driller games).

The game remains exclusive to the Japanese Arcade, where it debuted in 2005 on the Taito Type X hardware. While it remains an obscurity in the greater gaming world, it is popular in the speedrun community due to its fast-paced gameplay.

Gameplay

The heroine's only weapon is an umbrella, but it has multiple uses: she can use it to charge enemies, sail across bodies of water, plant its point in a wall and use it to spring upwards, gently float across horizontal gaps and reflect bullets when the umbrella is up. The stages are built to be traversed as quickly as possible with the umbrella, as a large screen-filling robot will start to pursue the heroine if she spends too long in any one stage.

Stages branch after completion, allowing the player to select their next destination from a couple of choices.